Version 7... a Universal binary?

[frphotios]

Forgive me, if I missed this somewhere, but I'm trying to ascertain if version 7 is a univeral binary, to run natively on the intel machines. Anyone know?

 

Thanks!

[Helen Brown]

No, it is not Universal Binary, but it runs just fine on Intel machines. We do plan to port version 7 to Universal Binary later, but we had other priorities for this first release.

[Joe Weaks]

Anyone done benchmarks yet?

Apps using Rosetta on an Intel Mac for the most part run slower than on G5 counterparts in the tests being done. (Adobe apps, for instance)

[jpkang]

Anyone done benchmarks yet?

Apps using Rosetta on an Intel Mac for the most part run slower than on G5 counterparts in the tests being done. (Adobe apps, for instance)

Anecdotally, I compared three systems running Accordance 7.0 under OS X 10.4.6:

 

12.1" PowerBook G4/1.33 GHz/768MB RAM

13.3" MacBook Core Duo/2.0 GHz/2GB RAM

G5 Quad/2.5 GHz/4.5GB RAM

 

All Energy Saver settings on all three machines were "Normal," i.e. Processor Performance was "Automatic," and Accordance was the only active app.

 

As expected, the G5 was definitely much faster than either laptop, but I don't know whether this is primarily due to multiprocessor threading or faster bus/clock speeds and/or cache. The MacBook was typically as fast as the PowerBook, but sometimes dramatically faster (like searching for all words in a tagged Hebrew or Greek text, for which the MacBook appeared to be at least twice as fast). Generating a concordance of the entire Hebrew Bible took about the same time on both laptops.

 

One thing I did notice was that Rosetta seems to go dormant when an emulated program is not being actively used, so that doing a new, processor-intensive operation after it has been sitting without any input for a few minutes would take longer to start than if it had been executed in quick succession to another operation.

 

So expect your mileage to vary, but at least I predict most people won't notice any slowdown of Accordance on Intel Macs (with the possible exception of the Core Solo Mac mini), and given that most Accordance search results appear (impressionistically) instantaneous, there's not a whole lot of improvement we could hope for!